Mother India, Mother Earth

My first journey to India was in 1974. I was 20 years old and a student of anthropology in Kenya, East Africa. The world around me had become large and exciting. There were African drums, cultures and languages that held me spellbound, moonlit nights and ancient Swahili cities along the African coast and a sense of being alive in a way I had never felt before. My heart, mind, soul and spirit had expanded so much that my university courses could no longer hold them. I dropped out of school for a year and with nothing but a backpack and a few dollars set off to discover the world.

I began by hitch-hiking the length of Africa with many fateful adventures as I traveled the length of The Indian Ocean from Kenya to South Africa with stops in isolated Madagascar and war-torn Mozambique, still fighting for independence from Portuguese colonial rule. In South Africa, I was able to see the effects of Apartheid first hand as I worked to save a few dollars to continue my journey. I traveled by hitch-hiking or on third class trains or buses that were actually trucks with some wood benches thrown in the back and stacked high with every imaginable form of cargo. After eight months on the road in Africa, I was ready for the next chapter in the unfolding story of life.

I sailed on the S.S Karanja of the British East India Navigation Co. on a third-class passage from Mombasa, Kenya, to Bombay. The boat was filled with the whole cast of characters from that era seeking either the meaning of life, a guru, the world's best and cheapest places to hang out, or just that sense of being fully alive that adventure brings. The nights were filled with the African music of the Swahili seamen who manned the ship. There was a depth, heart, and vitality in them and in their music that somehow conveyed the essence of what I was seeking in my own life and what had called me to leave suburban California where I grew up to search for something more real.

It was on one of those "music club" evenings on the deck of the ship that I met Ganshyam, a spiritual teacher from India. He was returning from a voyage to Kenya where he worked to keep the Vedic teachings alive among the Indian families who had migrated to East Africa at the turn of the century. I had studied eastern religion in college, taken a yoga class, and completed my first meditation retreat at the Samye Ling Tibetan Center in Scotland. So, the ancient wisdom of which Ganshyam spoke was familiar. But as he spoke of the true Self, a presence and knowing touched a part deep within me of which I was barely aware. When we reached Bombay, Ganshyam invited me to stay at his home.

In India there is a saying that the guest is treated as the Divine; and as the hospitality and the life in his simple home opened its heart to me, I began to open my heart to India. Ganshyam's mother gave up her bed for me and slept on a mat in the tiny sitting room of their humble home. She spent a large part of her day, along with completing household chores, sitting on a thin, woven mat reading and softly chanting the Bhagavad Gita. Her kindness, love, and patience were her way of teaching me the Gita in a way that the pages of a book never could. It was as if her whole being--body, mind, and spirit--had become completely wedded with the spiritual essence of this sacred text; and the folds of the sari around her thin body had become one with the pages.

Together with Ganshyam I searched for a vision of truth in what looked to me sometimes like a three-ring spiritual circus! We visited a sadhu who had not lain down to sleep in 25 years. He sat smiling on a swing, rocking contentedly back and forth as devotees brought fruit and garlands of flowers. We visited an ashram of Hatha yogis who twisted themselves into knots as they passed a pipe of marijuana around and stared out in profound detachment at the crowd of devotees bringing offerings. Some experiences struck a deeper chord. We visited ancient temples carved from solid stone, enormous deities etched into granite hillsides, and numerous ashrams where the chanting of the ancient Vedic scriptures and the singing of sacred hymns filled the air. Remembering the peaceful smile of a woman softly intoning the Gita and the sweet satsangs of devotional hymns brings me back to that time long ago yet still present.

I was also introduced on that first journey to the paradox of India, a culture in some ways so different from my own that I wondered if I would ever touch its essence. One morning, Ganshyam's sister invited me to go with her to get some milk for morning tea. What I had envisioned as a quick walk to the corner market turned out to be an hour of waiting in line with perhaps one hundred others for one cup of milk from a single exhausted-looking buffalo for the family's tea. This was my first, but definitely not the last test of patience that is one of the many faces of India.

For me, the price of admission to India always seemed to be paid upon departure. As I embarked on the last leg of my journey out of India to Nepal by train, I encountered a "food riot" where thousands of starving people fleeing an area of famine rushed onto trains in huge masses. They crowded through windows and sat on top of the rail cars, all in hopes of reaching somewhere they might find food. My first thought was a very American, "Hey, this is my seat; I paid for this seat." However, the terror and hunger on their faces quickly alerted me to the seriousness of the situation. I climbed up into a luggage rack with my backpack under me and stayed there for six hours.

For the first time, I began to understand human suffering as I watched incredulously this frightened mass of humanity struggling for sheer survival in the theater of life below me.

I reached the Nepali border that night, exhausted and disoriented. The bus to Kathmandu was to leave at dawn. The following morning was one of those inexplicable magical moments where we cross a bridge in time to something new. I remember each moment of the rising dawn ride in a horse-drawn carriage through the mist, past shadows of bodies draped in soft wool cloaks. Somehow my mind retains the sound of each of the horse's hooves as they struck cobblestone, the smell of clove cigarette mixed with cow dung and incense from an early morning puja. At the border crossing, the Nepali immigration officer gave me a woodblock print of the Buddha on rice paper. As I entered Nepal there was a moment of transformation in which a part of me was left behind and someone new continued on. I had touched for the first time the powerful alchemy that is India.

Diamonds and coal

My next journey in 1984 allowed me to see another India. As a photojournalist I had the opportunity to step into the lives of the rich and famous of the country. I met and interviewed flashy, jadedbusinessmen who saw India's teeming population as an

inexhaustible market for their products. I also met the patriarchs of family empires, employing millions of people, which control a large percentage of India's economy. These families were keen to emphasize their contribution to Indian society through their support of hospitals, schools, Hindu temples, and public service projects.

Of these visits, one stands out as unique. In Gujarat we went to interview the head of a large industrial group whose family had previously been the ruling maharajas of that area. Instead of the usual trappings of wealth and success, we found him in a simple white office, stark except for a desk and a painting of a flower in a white frame. He, too, was dressed in white. Rather than a talk on India's economy, he spoke to us of impermanence, of the real Self beyond identity, and of how he would be the last of this family to play the role of ruling-class noble turned industrial baron. He told us that the textile factory we were visiting was somewhat famous since this was the first place Ghandi had held a nonviolent resistance protest. He took us to his family's palace, a lavish mogul style mansion with vast grounds and peacocks wandering through sculptured gardens. Noticing our amazement at the opulence, he commented that none of this could bring us even one step closer to the true Self.

Shortly afterwards I visited Calcutta for the first time. Nothing could have prepared me for this experience. We came into the city at night and passed miles of sidewalk where every square inch was occupied by sleeping body after sleeping body with hardly room to roll over! Some sections of sidewalk, I was told, had been inhabited by several generations who had rarely seen the inside of a house. During the day these humans would eke out a survival--hauling, cleaning, begging--in what looked to me more like an urban disaster area than a city. I marveled at the ability of human beings to sustain and even re-create life in this environment. More amazing still was their complete faith in a God who would create and sustain such a world.

This, for me, was the living paradox of India, a culture totally immersed in spirituality on the one hand and struggling desperately for material survival on the other. I asked a spiritual teacher about this seeming contradiction of India. "Diamond and coal," he explained, "are the same substance. People come to India looking for the diamond, but then are shocked to find the coal mine. It's not that the diamond doesn't exist, but people are looking for it in the wrong place. To find the diamond, you must dig deep; but the diamond is not India, it is you!"

Shortly before leaving India this time, the coal mine almost collapsed completely. On Oct 31,1984, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the prime Minister of India, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguard. When the rigid social and caste norms that keep India's massive, repressed population in check break down, murderous rage can erupt. Crowds of Hindus took out their vengeance on hundreds of innocent Sikh families. I still see the flames and hear the screams from a car turned onto its side and a match thrown into its gas tank

becoming a flaming bomb. I was riding in an old Indian Ambassador automobile with three colleagues, two of whom were women, together with our Indian driver. We watched the mob leave the burning vehicle and come toward us. But shock kept us from fleeing. As the crowd reached our car, we locked the doors and rolled up the windows. They pounded the windows with their bare fists until they began to give, and then began to rock the old Ambassador to flip it.

A life-saving intuition called me from somewhere as I said, "Roll down the window halfway, open the back of the cameras, start passing out the opened rolls of film, and yell, 'we're friends.'" Their tearing through the film released just enough of their rage for us to begin to talk to them. They were clearly concerned that we might have photos of their murdering rampage. After a few minutes of talking to their "leaders," we drove away from what I can only describe as a near-death experience.

I walked in Indira's funeral procession and sat in the press corps while the most powerful of India watched her body placed on the cremation pyre and the highest priests of this ancient land recited the sacred mantras that have resonated since the dawn of time. I remember the difficulty the attendants had lighting the cremation pyre and the absurdity of one of the journalists trying to wave the fire attendants away from the body so he could get a better shot! Then one of the most powerful women in the world was aflame. Three days later her ashes were spread over the Himalayas. As I boarded a plane back home, Mother India had worked her magic of transformation again. The journalist was left behind; and something new was being created.

What is there to be afraid of ?

The following year I left journalism to begin my healing journey, to find my own diamond. I experienced dead ends into coal mines of sheer blackness from which I felt I would never emerge as well as caverns of luminous diamond light that never seemed to end. The journey always felt guided by a light and a sense of peace that I had first seen on an old woman's face as she read the Gita many years before. Two more trips to India were to follow, including a six-month stay in Dharamsala and the Himalayas. I walked in beatific Himalayan light, sensed the spiritual depth in temples and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and visited wise teachers in search of a diamond whose presence was becoming clearer.

One day, I hiked into the Himalayas to see a hermetic Tibetan monk who, I was told, knew where the diamond could be found. He had a small, stone hut built out of the end of a cave. Inside was a small wood stove, a meditation cushion, and a stack of carefully placed and wrapped Tibetan prayer books. "What would you like to ask?" he said through the translator. "How can I overcome fear?" He gazed around the hut as if wondering, "Where might fear live in a place such as this?". He then broke into a broad grin and answered with another question, "If you love other people and treat them with kindness and compassion, what would you ever have to be afraid of?"

During this trip I volunteered as an English teacher for the Tibetan refugee community. In connection with this service work, I had the opportunity to have a one-hour private audience with the Dalai Lama. He possessed simplicity and humor and also a depth and presence of clarity that impressed me deeply. In his presence I felt transported into a space as vast and limitless as the sky. As we walked out of his audience chamber and down a long, marble walkway, he took my hand between his two hands with simplicity and love like that of two small boys perfectly content in the moment that surrounds them. As we walked slowly and in silence, I felt a light and a prayer rising within my heart: "I offer my life for the benefit of others". As I walked out into the vast Himalayan sky ringed with snow-capped peaks, there was only space and light. I took a full breath for the first time in my life and realized that fear had been left behind.